CPA Mel Abraham moved all his investments to cash after hearing a market collapse prediction at a conference 34 years ago. He stayed in cash for a decade, losing more than $3 million in growth. Fear overrides financial knowledge, even for professionals.
It was about 34 years ago, I literally sat in a conference and listened to a speaker make the case that the market was going to collapse. And I didn't even wait for him to finish speaking. I literally got up, went out to the lobby, called my broker and said, put me in cash, put me in cash. I don't want to play this game anymore. And so he did. I cashed everything out, but there I stayed. For a decade. The cost of that one phone call that I made in 90 seconds from the lobby of a conference, driven entirely by fear, amounted to a total, when I did the calculation, of over $3 million in missed investing and missed investment growth. Y'all, I'm a CPA and I had more than 30 years of financial knowledge when this happened. And I still made that call. Because when emotions go up, your financial intellect goes down every single time.
